Site Mobile Navigation

Tracing the Path of Jewish Medical Pioneers

The young man who applied to medical school in the spring of 1933 had graduated from Dartmouth College with good grades, a keen interest in medicine and, according to the university official who interviewed him, a nice sense of humor.

The application did not ask about religion, but the interviewer surmised it. “Probably Jewish,” he wrote in a scribbled evaluation, “but no unpleasant evidence of it.”

The handwritten note was found in the admissions files of the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. After the implementation of quotas, the proportion of Jews in the student body fell to less than 5 percent in 1938 from nearly half in 1920.

The note is displayed in an exhibition called “Trail of the Magic Bullet: The Jewish Encounter With Modern Medicine, 1860-1960,” on view at Yeshiva University Museum in Manhattan. The exhibition offers a rare look at a topic few patients ever stop to consider: the emergence of European and American Jews as innovators in medicine, despite their status as outsiders frequently scorned by the medical establishment.

While some religions place ultimate responsibility for healing in divine hands, “Jews don’t see a conflict between faith and medicine,” said Alan M. Kraut, a professor of history at American University who helped put together the exhibition and has written extensively about immigration and health.

“The healer is seen as one of God’s instruments, not a competing force,” he said. “The physician is someone held in the highest esteem, doing God’s work — preserving life.”

During the Middle Ages, European Jews were instrumental in the spread of medical knowledge, translating many important early medical treatises from Arabic into Hebrew and other languages. One of the books in the exhibition is said to be the first medical textbook printed in Hebrew, a translation of a treatise written by the Persian physician-philosopher Avicenna in the 11th century.

But Jews were not admitted into most medical schools in Europe; they learned medicine through apprenticeships or were self-taught, said Dr. Edward I. Reichman, a physician and rabbi who practices at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and teaches medical ethics. One university in Padua, Italy, admitted Jews in the 1500s, but charged them higher fees than other students.

The Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society, one of many Jewish health groups started in New York, used sunlight to help treat tuberculosis in Colorado about 1930.Credit
Beck Archives, Special Collections and Archives, Penrose Library and Center for Judaic Studies, University of Denver

There were exceptions, however. “Almost every pope in history had a personal physician who was Jewish,” Dr. Reichman noted.

In the late 1800s, medical schools in Europe started opening their doors to Jews, and many entered the profession, including some of the first women to study medicine, said Josh Feinberg, who curated the exhibition. By the early 20th century, half of the physicians in Berlin were Jewish, as were 60 percent of the physicians in Vienna and 70 percent of the physicians in Warsaw.

Because they were barred entry to established specialties like surgery, Jews flocked to new, less prestigious fields, making their marks in areas like psychiatry (psychoanalysis was for a while called the “Jewish science”), dermatology, neurology, immunology, pathology and gynecology.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Few escaped the pervasive prejudice, however. In the early 1900s, Dr. Paul Ehrlich, a German Jew who discovered a treatment for syphilis and is considered the father of chemotherapy, popularized the term “magic bullet” to describe a medical compound that would “aim exclusively at the dangerous intruding parasites” yet not “touch the organism itself.”

But though Dr. Ehrlich was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1908, he was not made a full professor at a university until 1914, a year before he died. (That posting was at the University of Frankfurt, in the year of its founding.) In the 1930s, as the Nazis came to power, his name was removed from textbooks and taken off Frankfurt’s street signs. Paul-Ehrlich-Strasse regained its name only after World War II.

Many of New York’s most familiar medical institutions have their roots in the late 19th century. An influx of poor Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe to the Lower East Side raised concern over cramped living conditions in the tenements, leading to the development of several Jewish health organizations in New York, like the Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society, and the establishment of Jewish hospitals, open to patients of all religions.

As the importance of early child health became clear, the Visiting Nurse Service focused on maternal health and pre- and postnatal infant care, using graphic posters with Yiddish captions to encourage breast-feeding and to teach basic hygiene.

In the 1920s and 1930s, as American medical schools like Columbia cut the number of Jews they admitted, many went to Scotland to study. The doors to hospital-based training programs were closed, but new Jewish hospitals absorbed the trainees. The Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, a sponsor of the exhibition, was established in the 1950s.

A last section in the exhibition grapples with Jewish medical ethics and religious approaches to questions posed by modern medical science, from genetic testing and stem cell research to end-of-life issues and organ donation.

Whether Jewish physicians were observant or not, their practices incorporated teachings from around the globe, said Bert Hansen, a historian of science and medicine at Baruch College and an exhibition adviser.

“There was never a ‘Jewish medicine’ the way there was Chinese or Eastern medicine,” he said. “Jewish doctors wanted to learn and then use the best medical techniques and thought of the time.”

Correction: May 24, 2012

An article on May 15 about “Trail of the Magic Bullet,” an exhibition at the Yeshiva University Museum whose subject is the emergence of Jews as innovators in medicine, erroneously included one organization among Jewish health groups that were established in New York to address the needs of poor immigrants. The Visiting Nurse Service is not one of them. (Though Lillian Wald, who was instrumental in the service, was Jewish, the program was initiated by the New York Society for Ethical Culture as a nonsectarian service.) The article also gave the incorrect impression that the University of Frankfurt was slow to award a full professorship to Dr. Paul Ehrlich, who is considered the father of chemotherapy. While Dr. Ehrlich, a 1908 Nobel laureate, did not become a full professor “until 1914,” it was not because the University of Frankfurt waited until then to make the decision. The university was not founded until 1914.

A version of this article appears in print on May 15, 2012, on Page D6 of the New York edition with the headline: Tracing the Path of Jewish Medical Pioneers. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe